Get Financial News with the Bloomberg App for iPad

The Bloomberg app for iPad offers instant access to news coverage, and it provides stock and index data like you'd expect. It also provides currency, commodities, and bond data. For some icing on this cake of financial goodness, it offers direct access to a number of Bloomberg-produced podcasts that will be invaluable to traders and investors wanting to learn more about the markets.

The home screen (accessed by a button simply labeled Bloomberg when you're in another tab) offers you all the top financial news of the day and snapshots of the major global indices (DOW JONES, S&P 500, FTSE 100, and NIKKEI 225), two stocks in a watchlist you set up, current data on the U.S. dollar, and tappable links to the different tabs in the app.

Bloomberg works in both landscape and portrait mode. The buttons at the bottom of the screen are laid out nicely in landscape mode, but in portrait mode they take up a third of the screen.

In the News tab, you get all of Bloomberg's news coverage divided into many categories over seven swipable pages. The first page has panes for Worldwide news, the Most Read stories of the day, Bonds, Commodities, and the company's Exclusive content. Swipe to the left, and you get a new page of Currency news, Economy Emerging Markets, Energy, and Funds. Another swipe, and you get five more categories, and so on. You can edit the order of all these categories, making this a convenient place to catch up on the news that's important to you.

The other big feature of this app is all the Bloomberg podcasts you can listen to on your iPad. You can get these podcasts from iTunes, but Bloomberg for iPad gives you easy access to the lot of them without you having to monitor and manage podcast subscriptions. There are podcasts for News, Economics, Politics, and the Markets. You can also listen to them even while you're messing around in other parts of the app.